(2003-08-25) Udell Dynamic Languages

Jon Udell on Dynamic Language-s and Web Services. The DotNet CLI is, by design, not friendly to dynamic languages... So Active State's Perl N E T technology bridges the existing Perl interpreter to the DotNet environment... Now Brian Lloyd, engineering vice president at Zope, has taken a similar approach with Python. I've been trying out [his](http://www.zope.org/Members/Brian/Python Net/index_html) experimental Python Net, a bridge between the Python interpreter (Version 2.2) and the .Net environment... Jython goes farther than Perl Net or Python Net, though not as far as I hoped dynamic languages in .Net would go. Sean McGrath, CTO of Propylon, has called Jython "the most compelling weapon the Java platform has for its survival into the 21st century."... In a world where computation lived within a single VM, strong type-checking and bytecode verification may have been reasons to prefer languages such as C Sharp and Java. But we don't live in that world any more. Computation is distributed (Distributed Computing); interfaces are language neutral and Document Oriented; cross-DoMain trust is a work in progress. In these circumstances, Dynamic Language-s - which neither the Java nor DotNet VM-s yet fully embrace - may be the best way to tame the services network we are now constructing.